Author: Scott Welch
The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association submitted a wide-ranging letter to CMS on March 30 in response to the agency’s information request on its Comprehensive Regulations to Uncover Suspicious Healthcare, or CRUSH, initiative. Seven BCBSA recommendations: 1. CMS should notify Medicare Advantage plans in real time when it suspends payments to a provider over suspected ...
Following significant industry outcry over a proposal to keep Medicare Advantage rates largely flat in 2027, the Trump administration has bumped payments up slightly in the final policy. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services initially proposed a 0.09% increase in rates as part of the MA and Part D Advance Notice. In the final rule, the increase ...
Weight loss is complex – and goes beyond counting calories, according to experts. Dr. Jason Fung, a kidney specialist and author of the recent book “The Hunger Code,” said lasting weight loss requires a shift in how people understand and respond to hunger. “Most of the time, we focus on eating less or what we’re eating, ...
The Trump Administration abruptly canceling – then perhaps reinstating or partially reinstating – federal health grants is creating overall “funding volatility” in state and local public health programs, officials told state lawmakers this week. The ongoing cuts and constant back-and-forth policy changes have confounded efforts to maintain state and local programs as well as retain ...
More than 10,000 people have enrolled in Nevada’s new public option health plans, which debuted last fall with the expectation that they would bring lower prices to the health insurance market. Those preliminary numbers from the open enrollment period that ended in January are less than a third of what state officials had projected. Nevada ...
Medicaid applications in Nevada skyrocketed by an average of 62% in December 2025 and this January and February over the same months a year earlier. The largest spike was in January, when the average daily number of pending applications for three categories of Medicaid – family medical; aged, blind, and disabled; and unregistered applicants (those who have ...
The Trump administration is preparing to impose new tariffs on branded drugs from pharmaceutical companies that have not struck landmark deals with the president to lower their U.S. drug prices, CNBC has learned. Patented medications and their active ingredients would be hit with a 100% tariff, according to a draft of the document obtained by ...
Two-year-old Bain Brandon has Type 1 diabetes and needs insulin to live. But even with health insurance, the price tag isn’t cheap. A one-month supply of insulin vials and a three-month supply of backup pens for the Mississippi toddler cost his parents $194 last week, according to his mom, 29-year-old Marlee Brandon. They can afford it right ...
U.S. employers, their benefits advisors, and health care products and services suppliers did a great job of holding down increases in health care costs between 2010 and 2024. Back in 2010, actuaries at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services predicted that employers would provide health coverage for just 168 million people in 2024, at ...
Mark Cuban, owner of Cost Plus Drugs and a longtime critic of the pharmaceutical industry, is speaking out in support of the congressional Break Up Big Medicine Act. “I don’t think people realize how much health care costs are driving big companies to fire and not hire,” he wrote in a social media post. “It ...